Month: June 2015

It seems that the folks in the various Azure teams at Microsoft have been really busy since the Build conference earlier this year getting products to various states of ship and it appears that this month is the mountain when it comes to releases and announcements. I got my usual Microsoft Azure new features and pricing announcements email last night and the number of new features here and features entering GA this month is astonishing.

Azure AD Connect

First and foremost, we have Azure AD Connect entering general availability. This is the replacement to all existing versions of DirSync and the Azure AD Sync tools. Whilst the directory synchronisation feature in itself isn’t anything special to talk about, for anyone still using DirSync, this is certainly a lot nicer to interact with and operate. Additionally, we have a number of the optional features available (a number of which are still classed as preview) to make synchronising your users between on-premise and Azure Active Directory that bit more rich. Sadly, there is still no Yammer integration with this version of Azure AD Connect so you still need to run the Yammer Directory Sync tool.

Azure Key Vault

This is a new service for Azure as opposed to an update to an existing service. Key Vault provides FIP 140-2 certified HSMs in the cloud. A HSM is a Hardware Security Module, a device used to manage security keys in encryption and it commonly found in Certificate Authorities and SQL Servers. I’ve worked with a number of PKI and SQL projects and none of them have ever had technical requirements for HSMs to be in-place. I suspect this has been added to Azure as a service by the request of one or more major companies sitting on the fence over public cloud right now because they need HSMs in order to meet some kind of regulatory or certification.

Azure Application Gateway

This is another new service and one which is really quite amazing in both it’s simplicity and the features that it brings. Azure Application Gateway is essentially an application request routing engine or reverse proxy as an Azure service. It allows you to publish Azure hosted, non-Azure publicly hosted or even on-premise applications to the world. It supports SSL offload to take the key processing workload away from your servers and it can be integrated with Azure Traffic Manager to provide geographic awareness for your applications.

Where I see this being especially useful is for companies currently hosting applications on-premise that are either publicly accessible or published to allow employees or partners access to a service. By publishing applications via Azure Application Gateway instead, companies can have their applications published but without the need to break holes in their own firewalls for those incoming connections.

The pricing on Azure Application Gateway seems very reasonable to me also which is going to make it extremely popular I think.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse

While all the previous service offerings have been general availability, this one is just a limited public preview however Azure SQL Data Warehouse was one of the brand new services announced earlier this year at Build so it’s great to see it moving along. I tend not to get involved so much with large SQL data warehousing work being more of an infrastructure specialist than a data specialist however I can see how if priced suitably, this is going to be a major service of interest for some businesses who want to leverage the cost benefits of the public cloud due to the fact that Data Warehousing can be extremely expensive to properly implement on-premise. This coupled with the fact that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is going to be tightly integrated with Power BI from Office 365 as well as Azure services like Machine Learning is going to make it very easy for customers to do more with their data.

In my quest for private cloud (and public) nirvana, I’m always looking for ways to automate parts of the first run user experience so that as IT Pros, we can build and deliver services to users which fit the bill right out of the gate. In a previous post from earlier this year, in a post entitled Automatically Assign DVD Drive Letter VMM Private Cloud, I walked you through the process of using a PowerShell script that would run as a GUI Run Once script as part of a VMM initiated virtual machine deployment to set the DVD Drive letter.

Since I posted this article, I’ve made a couple of improvements to the environment that I wanted to share with you all and in this first post, I will cover off how to automatically label and name the OS drive on our newly deployed virtual machines. This process involves applies registry keys. As with my first post, you could achieve the same results with Group Policy, however I like all of my modifications to be applied to the local machine so that if the machine is deployed as a non-domain joined server into a DMZ or if there is an issue with the first time Group Policy gets processed, these settings still get applied but I will cover both methods here. This would also work in a multi-tenant or hosting environment where VMs may not being landing in your own domain or environment.

Add the Script to the VM Template

If you followed my previous post, you will be familiar with mounting the .vhd file for the VM Template on another server to modify the local file system. If you are unsure of this, please refer back to my original article Automatically Assign DVD Drive Letter VMM Private Cloud for guidance.

With the .vhd file mounted, we are going to add a new PowerShell script to the FirstRun folder named Set-OSDriveLabel.ps1 and it will contain the following.

Short and sweet, this script will detect the Windows installation drive from the PowerShell SystemDrive environment variable and set this drive letter to use the label OS as defined in the DriveLabel variable.

One important note here is that this setting is applied to the Wow6432Node on a 64-bit server. If you were applying this to a client OS that was 32-bit then you would need to remove the Wow6432Node portion of the registry key location. I find this a peculiar one given that this change effects Windows Explorer which is a 64-bit process.

With the PowerShell script saved in the FirstRun folder, we need to update the FirstRun.cmd wrapper script that invokes the containerised PowerShell scripts in the appropriate escalated manner. Simply add the following lines to the script before the clean-up section at the end.

I hope this takes away another manual step from your VM build processes and brings you one step closer to nirvana. In another post coming soon, I will have instructions on how to hide some of the folders from the This PC or “My Computer” folder which don’t really belong on a server and another post to clarify the steps on creating Network Locations for the This PC folder.

If you have an Office 365 subscription on any plan Small Business Essentials or above, you will be entitled to Yammer Enterprise. Yammer, if you are unaware is an enterprise social networking product that Microsoft acquired a while back and is billed to replace the social features in SharePoint Online over time. Enterprise social networking I think is like marmite and some companies promote the idea whilst others shy away from it which I think has held back adoption and therefore, Yammer isn’t as widely used as you would think, especially for a free service as part of your existing Office 365 license.

Regardless of this, in this post, I will walk you through the very simply steps to activate your Yammer Enterprise network for your Office 365 Tenant and explain some of the next steps you can take to make Yammer more integrated into your business functions and make it more functional for end-users.

Activate Your Yammer Enterprise Network

From the Dashboard presented when you login, you will have an option for Activate Yammer Enterprise under the Manage Your Organisation heading. Once you have selected this, you will be taken to the domain selection page.

On this page, you must select which of your verified Office 365 domains you want to activate Yammer for.

Yammer is designed primarily for single domain use so if you work at an organisation which has multiple domain names such as regional domains for each country or territory that you operate in then you will need to activate your Yammer Enterprise network for one domain initially. Once you have your network setup with a single domain, you can follow the instructions on the TechNet article Combine Multiple Yammer Networks (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn804812(v=office.15).aspx) to contact Yammer Technical Support to add the secondary domains.

Once you have selected your domain and you select the Activate Yammer Enterprise button, after a few minutes your new Yammer network will be created.

By design, Office 365 Global Admins will automatically be provisioned as Network Admins in Yammer to administer your network however I found this didn’t work as it should and I had to follow a fix I found on the Office 365 Community by adding a new Global Admin afer the network creation which did get added to Yammer and then I logged in as that user and re-added my other Global Admins manually.

Syncing Domain Users to Yammer with DSync

Whilst Yammer Enterprise is made available via your Office 365 Tenant and allows your users to use their Office 365 credentials for logging in to Yammer Enterprise (be it as a cloud user, an on-premise AD user via DirSync or AADSync or whether you have ADFS setup and configured), the user on-boarding and off-boarding processes for Yammer are distinct. What this means for your end-users is that whilst they can visit yammer.com and try and login using their Office 365 credentials, they actually need to be registered in your network first.

Microsoft provides a tool called Yammer Directory Sync or DSync which functions in a similar fashion to the DirSync or AADSync tools for Azure Active Directory. The DSync tool doesn’t sync any passwords because those are provided via Office 365 and Azure Active Directory however DSync will sync the Name, Job Title, Office, Telephone and Mobile fields of an AD object to Yammer and will provision an account for the user. Setting up Yammer DSync is outside of the scope of this post but you can find out more from the TechNet article Install Yammer Directory Sync (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dn799032).

Yammer Directory Sync will automatically create Yammer users in your network as new AD users are created and it will also remove users when they are deleted from AD covering off the provision and deprovision processes. As you would expect, the tool updates user attributes as they are changed in AD.

If you don’t setup Yammer Directory Sync then each of your users will need to manually register for Yammer the first time they visit the site and accounts will not be automatically deprovisioned when you remove an AD user account.

Replacing the SharePoint Newsfeed with Yammer

SharePoint Online as with all versions of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 provides the Newsfeed functionality which is designed to be your timeline of information for your companies collaboration world. The Newsfeed in SharePoint is part of a users’ My Site area however Yammer being an enterprise social network provides a better capability for newsfeed and maintaining two systems for one function is redundant. Luckily, there is an option we can change that will replace the native SharePoint Newsfeed with the Yammer service.

As a Global Admin, login to the Office 365 Admin Center and browse to your SharePoint Admin Center. From the SharePoint Admin Center, among the options, you will find a setting titled Enterprise Social Collaboration. Under this heading, change the setting from Use SharePoint Newsfeed (Default) to Use Yammer.com Service. As per the description for this setting, it can take up to 30 minutes for the setting to propagate all of the Office 365 servers so for a short period of time, some users may still be directed to their Newsfeed after this is changed.

Embedding Yammer Feeds into SharePoint

SharePoint is where your company stores its documents and data so it makes sense to have related comments and social interaction from staff in the same place. On the Yammer site, you can find out how to use Yammer Embed to incorporate Yammer Feeds and Pages into your SharePoint sites or even any HTML web site your company may have. You can find out more about Yammer Embed at https://developer.yammer.com/v1.0/docs/embed.

It’s worth noting here that there is currently, a Yammer Web App for SharePoint however this is being discontinued later this year therefore there is no point building a system using the Web App now as you will have to re-create it before not too long and it makes better sense to develop using the long-term solution now.

I hope this post sheds a bit more light on what Yammer is, how to get it and how to start using it.

In Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft added the ability to tier Storage Spaces such that hard disks and solid state drives where in separate tiers allowing the Storage Pool and the Storage Spaces in the pool to operate like a SAN that offers up hot block technology, automatically moving frequently accessed data up to the faster disks and less frequently accessed data down to the slower tiers.

In some circumstances, you may find that you want to pin a particular file or in the case of Hyper-V a VHD file accessed over an SMB file share to a particular tier. For example, you may want to pin the VHD file that hosts your virtual SQL Server TempDB files onto the SSD tier of your Storage Pool so that they are nice and fast. Inversely, you may want to pin data to the slow tier so that even if the Storage Pool detects the data as frequently accessed, it will never take up valuable space in your SSD tier.

In my lab, I am using Data Protection Manager (DPM) to backup my SQL databases among other things. The DPM server is a Hyper-V VM with the VHDs for the DPM server stored on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Space which is accessed over SMB 3.0. As my Storage Pool consists of two tiers using SSD and spinning HDD disk, I don’t want the backup volumes to be able to ever exist on the SSD tier and storing backup data on fast disk is a waste of time (there is one caveat and that is that you may want to force the backup data onto the SSD tier in the event of a major failure in the datacentre and you are going to be doing a lot of restores over a short period of time).

To achieve pinning of files to a particular tier in the Storage Pool, we need to use the PowerShell Cmdlets for managing Storage Spaces either via PowerShell Remoting or directly on the SMB File Server hosting the files.

Setting the Desired Storage Tier

First, we need to get the name of the Storage Space, otherwise referred to as the Virtual Disk.

Get-VirtualDisk

Once we execute the Get-VirtualDisk Cmdlet, we will see a list of all of the Storage Spaces. You may have multiple in which case you need to determine which you are interested in however in my lab, there is only one. Next, we need to declare the name of our Virtual Disk in a variable.

$VD = Get-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "VMs"

Using the Cmdlet above, we repeat Get-VirtualDisk however this time, we are setting the output for a specific Virtual Disk named VMs to the $VD variable so that we can re-use it later on.

With our Virtual Disk in a variable, we can now set the desired storage tier for a file. Use the Set-FileStorageTier Cmdlet above to achieve this. In my example, I am setting the DPM Pool disk VHDX file such that it will exist only on the hard disk slow disk tier. If you wanted to achieve the opposite and bind a file to the SSD tier then you would simply change the HDD value of the -MediaType parameter to SSD.

Optimize Files to the Desired Tier

Once you have run the Cmdlets above, your Storage Space is now ready and set to pin the file to the tier that you specified however this does not automatically move the files. The files are not moved until the next time a Tier Optimize job runs however we can force this if you want to move the file in a hurry or if you want to move the file to the appropriate tier before you start loading it with data (such as a new blank VHD file).

Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter V -TierOptimize

With the above, we use the Optimize-Volume Cmdlet against the drive letter on which the Storage Space and the files exist. This will start the process of evaluating file tier placement against the heat of a file and move files up and down through the tiers as required. This will also execute any placement rules which have been hard set as we did above. If you happened to be physically looking at your server at this point, you would likely see a flurry of disk activity as files get moved up and down through the drive tiers.

Once the optimization has finished, we can verify that the files are in the appropriate places using the following Cmdlet.

Get-FileStorageTier -VolumeDriveLetter V | FL

This Cmdlet will report any files which have been manually pinned to a particular Storage Space disk tier and will report their placement status. In my example, I have only the one DPM Storage Pool disk pinned to the HDD tier and this file is reporting as “Completely on tier” after the successful completion of the Tier Optimize job.

Earlier this week, I got an email form the Azure Team to announce that as part of security improvements to the Azure App Service Web Apps (formerly known as Azure Websites) they will be making changes to the supported SSL cipher suites with the changes taking effect as of July 18th 2015. Additionally, Microsoft have provided a test site that is running the new suite of ciphers at https://testsslclient.trafficmanager.net.

I decided to take the test site for a drive over on the Qualys SSL Labs tool the SSL Server Tester. I’ve been using this site for a long time now as a means to test SSL enabled websites as it allows you to verify the whole configuration in one place including the certificate, protocols and cipher suites. I ran the test site through Qualys SSL Server Tester as well as this blog which is running on a current generation Azure Web App site to compare the results.

It’s important to understand the difference between a Web App and a Cloud Service before we get much further into this too. Some people will be looking at this post and thinking why don’t I just enable or disable the relevant protocols or ciphers within my application however herein lies the difference between the Web App and a Cloud Service. The Web App in web hosting terms is a website running on a multi-instance web server. A Cloud Service is a dedicated instance that you are responsible for so allow you more control but at the expense of additional complexity. With a Cloud Service, we can configure the ciphers and protocols as part of the service definition which runs in the form of a start-up script. With a Web App, we don’t have any of these levels of deep system level access so have to accept what we are given.

Running the test on this site, richardjgreen.net I get the same result I have achieved for some time, a overall score of Grade B. The grade in this instance is limited to B because the server is allowing weak RC4 ciphers as well as a Triple DES (3DES) cipher. Additionally, the current site does not support Forward Secrecy, sometimes seen at Perfect Forward Secrecy or PFS for short. The final message stating that the site only works with browsers supporting Server Name Indication or SNI for short is not a security failure. This is due to the fact that I have opted to only support SSL for SNI browsers on my Azure Web App instance.

Running the test again against the test site, we can see that the result has improved to an overall score of Grade A. This is achieved because support for the weak RC4 ciphers has been dropped along with the Tripe DES (3DES) cipher. Additionally, the cipher suites have been re-ordered slightly and a new SHA384 3072 RSA key cipher has been added at the top of the cipher suite order meaning that this cipher should be the most preferable to use.

Looking at some of the details for the test, I also appears that the Web App instances are being built now on Windows Server 2012 R2 although how long this has may have been the case, I do not know? In the HTTP Server Signature for the SSL Server Tester results, richardjgreen.net shows Microsoft-IIS/8.0 whereas the Microsoft test site shows Microsoft-IIS/8.5.

I look forward to re-running the SSL Server Tester after the 18th July and seeing if the test result for my own site is as good as the test site shown.

I use Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials at home as my server and one problem that I have lived with for a long time is that I have a number of service accounts created to run some applications that I run centrally on the server itself. A problem with this is that these users will appear on the Essentials Dashboard which looks a bit unsightly. This isn’t something which has particularly bothered me but I accidently stumbled this morning on a blog post by Robert Pearman. His original post is at http://titlerequired.com/2014/09/18/quick-fix-hide-users-from-essentials-2012-r2-dashboard/ in which he provides the PowerShell Cmdlets for hiding users from the Dashboard.

In his example, he is using it to hide Exchange service accounts but the same principle applies. The first example below will hide the account for the service account SRV_SomeApplication.

Set-WssUserDashboardVisibility SRV_SomeApplication -Hidden

Replacing the -Hidden parameter with -Visible will unhide the account and allow it to be shown on the Dashboard once again.

As I have a number of service accounts and we all love PowerShell scripts for the sake of them, I decided to hide all my accounts in one go as I use a standard naming syntax for my service accounts. Sadly, the Wss Cmdlets don’t seem to support data received via the pipeline so whilst we would normally complete this as a one-liner by piping the get command into the related set command, this doesn’t work so we have to use a quick ForEach loop to achieve the same result.

About Richard J Green

Richard Green

Richard works as a Cloud Consultant for Fordway Solution where his primary focus is to help customers understand, adopt and develop with Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and System Center.

Richard Green is an IT Pro with over 15 years' of experience in all things Microsoft including System Center and Office 365. He has previously worked as a System Center consultant and as an internal solutions architect across many verticals.

Outside of work, he loves motorbikes and is part of the orange army, marshaling for NGRRC, British Superbikes and MotoGP. He is also an Assistant Cub Scout Leader.